From the Persian word meaning land of the Aryans; used as both a place name and given name.
Iran as a given name has a history entirely separate from its more famous role as a geopolitical term. In Persian, *Iran* derives from *Airyanam*, the Old Iranian genitive plural meaning "of the Aryans" or, more broadly, "land of the noble ones" — a term the ancient Achaemenid Persians used to describe themselves and their civilization. The name of the nation thus carries within it a declaration of dignity and ancestry stretching back over three thousand years, to the era of Cyrus the Great and Darius I, whose empire was the largest the ancient world had known.
As a personal name, Iran is most common in Brazil, where it entered wide use in the early twentieth century as part of a broader Latin American fashion for place names and exotic-sounding names drawn from world geography — a tradition that also produced Edson (for Edison), Ailton, and countless other Brazilian names that feel surprising to outsiders. In Brazil, Iran is unambiguously a masculine given name, pronounced roughly "ee-RAHN," and carries no political overtones — it is simply a name that sounds strong and musical to Brazilian ears. The name is also occasionally found in Turkey, Iran itself, and among diaspora communities, sometimes given in reference to national pride or ancestral connection.
In the contemporary English-speaking world, Iran as a personal name carries a certain startling quality — it stops a reader, forces a second look, and then reveals itself to be something ancient and dignified beneath the newspaper headlines. It is a name that contains a civilization.